Kandinsky and the Blue Rider: All Change

What happens when a painting no longer needs to represent anything at all?

In the years before the First World War, Wassily Kandinsky began to dismantle the visible world, transforming landscapes, horses and riders into exhilarating explosions of colour and form. Alongside the remarkable artists of the Blue Rider circle, including Franz Marc, Gabriele Münter and August Macke, he pursued a revolutionary idea: that painting, like music, could move us without depicting anything recognisable. From the Bavarian countryside to his great abstract Compositions, Rose explores the friendships, spiritual ambitions and artistic experiments that led Kandinsky towards abstraction. The series concludes with a question that would transform twentieth-century art: if a painting no longer needs to show us the world, what else might it do?